Israel war: Palestinians adrift after UNRWA aid ban

There is no alternative to the UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees, its chief insisted, following Israel’s order to ban the organisation that coordinates nearly all aid in war-ravaged Gaza.
“There is no plan B,” head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, Philippe Lazzarini, told reporters in Geneva.
Within the UN family, “there is no other agency geared to provide the same activities”, providing not only aid in Gaza, but also primary health care and education to hundreds of thousands of children,” he said.
“If you are talking about bringing in a truck with food, you will surely find an alternative,” he said, but “the answer is no” when it comes to education and primary healthcare.
He has called on the UN, which created UNRWA in 1949, to prevent the implementation of a ban on the organisation in Israel and occupied east Jerusalem, which was approved by the Israeli parliament last month.
The ban is due to take effect at the end of January.
UNRWA provides assistance to nearly six million Palestinian refugees across Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.
Lazzarini cautioned that a halt to UNRWA’s activities in Israel and East Jerusalem would block it from co-ordinating massive aid efforts inside Gaza.
“This would mean we could not operate in Gaza … and thus the environment would be much too dangerous,” he said.
If UNRWA ceases to operate, he warned, the responsibility for providing all the services it has provided until now “will come back to the occupying power, being Israel”.